October 12, 2018

NM Environment Review: Climate change and NM’s future

This week, we shared the entire NM Environment Review online. Next week, we’ll return to sharing only a snippet on the website and saving the rest for subscribers to the weekly email. To ensure you don’t miss out, sign up here.

Let’s face it: there’s only one story this week.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report Monday detailing the serious need for action on climate change.

As we reported Wednesday, the IPCC noted that if humans don’t drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade, we will not stop warming that’s expected to have widespread and catastrophic impacts upon the Earth’s ecosystems.

National papers, magazines and television programs covered the report, which includes a summary for policymakers. But here in New Mexico, most media outlets have so far ignored the report and its findings.

In an editorial tying together Albuquerque son William D. Nordhaus winning the Nobel Prize for economics and the release of the IPCC’s special report, the Santa Fe New Mexican noted, “That’s why, in every election from here on in, the first question voters must ask is: What will you do to stop the globe from heating up?”

After all, why would New Mexico voters prioritize climate change if they don’t have localized knowledge about how it affects their lives, the state’s economy and the future of a state we all profess to love?

I wish I could be optimistic that leadership at the state’s largest newspaper, the Albuquerque Journal, would snap to attention. Or that commercial television stations would educate their widespread audiences about what’s happening all around them. Despite the efforts of individual reporters, however, that doesn’t seem likely.

This week in particular, I can’t help but imagine how different the world would be today if news outlets—especially local papers and television stations—regularly covered the science behind climate change as well as its impacts beginning in the 1960s, when scientists alerted political leaders that the burning of fossil fuels was affecting the Earth’s atmosphere. Or even in the 1980s, when James Hansen testified before Congress. Or heck, even in 2015, when countries signed the Paris Agreement.

Scientists say we have about a decade to make serious changes when it comes to emissions.

We have far less time to overhaul the state’s media landscape when it comes to covering climate.

In other environment news:

• Aaron Cantú at the Santa Fe Reporter wrote about the challenges nonprofits have keeping up with the impacts of climate change, like this summer’s floods in the City Different.

• Daniel Chacón reported on the Santa Fe City Council’s plans to “reduce the city’s carbon footprint over the years, city officials are now on the verge of adopting an ambitious plan to act on a promise they made four years ago to be carbon neutral by 2040.”

• Maddy Hayden reported that Los Alamos has resumed shipping its transuranic waste to WIPP, in southeastern New Mexico.

• Saturday, we reported how D.C.’s environment decisions—coming out of the White House, the courts and Congress—affect New Mexico.

• Elizabeth Miller wrote for the Santa Fe Reporter about the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish’s review of trapping regulations.

• As I mentioned above, William D. Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As the New York Times reported, Nordhaus “has spent the better part of four decades trying to persuade governments to address climate change, preferably by imposing a tax on carbon emissions.” The NYT profiled William and his brother, Robert, in 2014, emphasizing their connections to New Mexico.

Unfortunately, Fisher is leaving New Mexico, heading to Dubuque, Iowa to work for the Telegraph Herald. The best of luck to him—though I will miss his consistent and dogged coverage of all the local and state government meetings related to the Gila River diversion project. Here’s hoping the Silver City Daily Press finds a great new reporter soon.

This week, we shared the entire NM Environment Review online. Next week, we’ll return to sharing only a snippet on the website and saving the rest for subscribers to the weekly email. To ensure you don’t miss out, sign up here.

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New Mexico officials find themselves stonewalled by the United States military over water contamination from two U.S. Air Force bases in the state. In early May, New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas and New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) Secretary James Kenney sent a letter to the U.S. Air Force over contamination, this time at Holloman Lake.

All week, we look for stories that help New Mexicans better understand what’s happening with water, climate, energy, landscapes and communities around the region. Thursday morning, that news goes out via email.

Holtec International was in the news last month when the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied requests from some groups to hold an additional hearing over the company’s license to build an interim storage site in southeastern New Mexico to hold nuclear waste from commercial power plants. The Camden, N.J.-based company is also hoping the NRC will allow it to buy a closed nuclear power plant in the Garden State so “it can decommission it and gain control over an almost $1 billion decommissioning fund,” according to a May 8 story from the Associated Press.

Holtec International was in the news last month when the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied requests from some groups to hold an additional hearing over the company’s license to build an interim storage site in southeastern New Mexico to hold nuclear waste from commercial power plants. The Camden, N.J.-based company is also hoping the NRC will allow it to buy a closed nuclear power plant in the Garden State so “it can decommission it and gain control over an almost $1 billion decommissioning fund,” according to a May 8 story from the Associated Press.

Holtec International was in the news last month when the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied requests from some groups to hold an additional hearing over the company’s license to build an interim storage site in southeastern New Mexico to hold nuclear waste from commercial power plants.

Laura Paskus has been writing about New Mexico’s natural resources and communities since 2002, as an assistant editor of High Country News, a radio producer at KUNM-FM, managing editor of Tribal College Journal and a freelancer for a variety of publications including the Santa Fe Reporter, New Mexico In Depth and Indian Country Today. Her work has also appeared in Al Jazeera America, Ms. Magazine, National Geographic Online, The Nature Conservancy Magazine, The Progressive, Columbia Journalism Review, The Mountain Gazette, Audubon and Orion. She's a correspondent for New Mexico In Focus and a graduate student in the University of New Mexico’s Geography and Environmental Studies Department.